Termination Man: a novel (9 page)

My dad shook his head. “My boy is a success,” he said. “I can’t argue with that. Now if I could only figure out exactly what it is that you do.”

“Dad, I’m one of the suits. A management consultant. Let’s not talk about it. We both know how you feel about those guys.”

My father was an old-school blue-collar man. In one corner of his heart, he ardently believed that the only legitimate form of work was something that made you sweat and long for the comfort of a hot shower at the end of your shift. When I was a boy, I’d heard his remarks of open disdain for the guys in the corner offices who “shuffle papers and attend meetings all day,” as he put it.

At the same time, my father was clearly ambivalent about it all. He had never encouraged me to follow in his footsteps. He had, in fact, ordered me to attend college. He didn't want his son to have to answer to a factory boss and a union steward, or to come home with hands that were stained black from a mixture of grease, oil, and metallic dust. I knew (or at least believed) that my father respected my success. But he wouldn’t have approved of all of the work that Craig Walker Consulting performed for various corporate clients. And I wasn’t sure about Mom and Laurie, either.

Therefore, I had never fully explained the full extent of my work to my family. They knew that I was a management consultant, and that I specialized in personnel matters. They didn’t know that I was the Termination Man—that I specialized in helping companies remove employees that they didn’t want anymore.

“My brother is a CIA agent,” Laurie said. “A spy.”

“Believe me, I’ve been called a lot worse.”

My mother stepped out of the kitchen. “Are you ready for meatloaf?” she asked. “I hope you’re hungry, because I baked two today.”

“Mom,” I said. “I’m always ready for your meatloaf.”

After the main dinner, my mom served her homemade pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream—another one of my favorites. Laurie excused herself from the table after dessert. My parents and I lingered over coffee.

“How’s Laurie doing?” I asked.

My mom shrugged. “She does her best. Your sister’s not a quitter. She’s got a new job, too. Why don’t you go talk to her? I’m sure she’d love to tell you about it herself.”

“Don’t you need my help in the kitchen?”

My mother gave me an expression that suggested that the idea of my helping out in the kitchen was patently ridiculous. “Craig, you’re worthless in the kitchen. Now go talk to your sister. You haven’t seen her—any of us—in a while.”

I had been home less than a month ago; but there is nothing to be gained by arguing with your mother about such things. I stood up from the table and walked down the short length of the house to Laurie’s room. The door to her room was open. She had a book in her lap: something by one of those self-help gurus like Anthony Robbins or Les Brown. My sister had read a lot of that stuff in the years since the shooting.

When she saw me, she folded the book in her lap. “Come on in, Craig.”

“So long as I’m not disturbing you,” I said.

“Don’t be an idiot. Come on in. Have a seat in my visitor’s chair.” She indicated a wood-framed, vinyl-padded chair beside the door of her closet. I remembered the day this chair had been brought in. It was shortly after the shooting; and her precarious condition had prompted us to rotate vigils at the foot of her bed. I had done my turns along with Mom and Dad.

“So how are you doing?” I asked.

“Great,” she said. This was Laurie’s standard response to general inquiries about her condition.

Taking my seat in the familiar chair, I had a look at the equally familiar surroundings. Laurie’s room was set up as a sort of in-house hospital room. Her bed had been modified so that she could easily lift herself in and out of it using only her arms. The bathroom was just down the hall, but she also kept a bedpan tucked discreetly in the shadows beneath the bed. The surface of the nightstand was covered with the pill bottles of her numerous prescriptions. Because she was confined to a wheelchair, Laurie was especially susceptible to respiratory system infections. This was one of the many secondary health risks associated with her spinal injury.

I was always a little taken aback by the state of Laurie’s room, perhaps because I could remember the way it used to be. When we were both kids, the little room had contained the typical trappings of an active, popular teenaged girl: Trophies won in sports and academic competitions. Posters of the latest rock stars and baby-faced teen heartthrobs. And there was usually a gift or some sort of memento associated with whomever she was dating at the time: a framed photograph, a guy’s letter jacket, sometimes a gold locket or a corsage from a recent school dance.

Now, though, the trophies had been cleared away. I had never discussed the matter with her; but I think that these were too painful reminders of how far she had fallen. The posters were gone, too: She knew that these would have been childish and more than a little pathetic in the room of a thirty-seven year-old woman. And of course the young men were gone, too. There were no more gifts and photos.  

“I’ve got a new job,” she said. “I’m working at a call center downtown. It’s like a sales position. I call people from a marketing research list who might be interested in refinancing their homes,” she said. “I like it. It gets me out of the house, it’s work I can do sitting down, and I’m apparently good at it. I think I’m going to be eligible for a sales award this month.”

“That’s excellent,” I said, trying to share Laurie’s enthusiasm for what was essentially a mind-numbing, entry-level telemarketing position. It had been years since I would have had to consider a job like that.

She went on to tell me about the disabled services bus that took her to and from work each day. Then she told me about Maria, a Mexican-American woman with whom she had struck up a friendship.

“I’ve got complete use of my upper body,” Laurie said. “I’m lucky, really—at least compared to Maria. Maria was shot, too, just like me—but she can barely use her arms. She uses a special voice-activated program to interact with the computer that dials the phone numbers.”

She told me more about Maria, and how the twenty-something woman had found herself in the wrong place and time when a drive-by shooting took place in her El Paso neighborhood near the Mexican border. “Maria’s got relatives up here,” Laurie explained. “And I think that she wanted to make a fresh start far away from El Paso. I can understand that.”

“Do you ever think about getting away from here?” I asked.

“Me? Oh, no—that’s not what I meant. Here is different. Maria lived in a crime-ridden neighborhood. I’ve got Mom and Dad, and all my old friends from the neighborhood—those who are still around, that is.”

Laurie didn’t need to tell me that by this point in her life, most of her old friends would have moved away from this neighborhood. They had either gotten married or simply moved on, drawn by better opportunities in more prosperous places.

“Well, I admire you,” I said. And I did. “I don’t think that I would be as strong as you in the same situation.”

I didn’t know if this was even the right thing to say, since it would draw her attention back to that wheelchair. But on the other hand, I knew that Laurie didn’t need me to remind her that she didn’t have the use of her legs anymore.

“It
is
tough,” she said. “You remember, me, right? The way I used to be?”

I nodded. I could remember her: strong, haughty, beautiful. The envy of the other girls in the neighborhood. My older sister—the one whom I had assumed would never be stopped by anything, would never change.

“Are you still hanging around with that Claire?” Laurie asked, abruptly changing the subject.

“Claire is my employee,” I said neutrally.

“Bullshit,” Laurie said. “You’re sleeping with that ‘employee’. She’s a conniving bitch. Watch out for her.”

“Well, just so you’re not afraid to come out and tell me how you feel about things.” I didn’t note that Laurie had guessed correctly about my sleeping with Claire.

“Little brother, I’ll always tell you exactly what I think.”

My visit with my parents and sister done, I stepped out the front door, my mother giving me hugs all the way to the threshold. I reflected for roughly the thousandth time that while I had not had a prosperous childhood, I had been blessed with two parents and a sister who loved me.

Out on the sidewalk now, I allowed myself a last look at the house with its tilting foundation. My childhood home was slowly crumbling, just like the city around it.

On the map of Ohio, Dayton forms a westward-pointing scalene triangle between Cincinnati to
the
south, and Columbus to the north. A stripped-down city of factories and warehouses, Dayton is a southerly outpost of the Great Lakes rust belt. The city has been bleeding jobs and population since the 1970s, when its manufacturing base began to decline. Today, nearly a quarter of Dayton’s population lives below the poverty line.

Things used to be different. The city known as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers experienced its first boom time during World War II. You’ve almost certainly heard of the Manhattan Project—the military-industrial effort that culminated in the development of the first atom bomb. But you probably haven’t heard of its subsidiary undertaking, known as the Dayton Project. During the war years, Dayton-area companies were involved in the development of neutron-generating devices—one of which formed the trigger mechanisms of the atom bombs known as Fat Man and Little Boy—the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The boom continued into the postwar years. My father—born three months before Pearl Harbor—had no trouble landing a high-paying blue-collar job when he was in his early twenties. All you needed was a high school diploma in those days, along with a little common sense and a willingness to work hard. My father was part of the last generation in which a blue-collar worker could reasonably expect to own his own home and provide for a family on a single paycheck. And even Dad had lived to see the decline of the old postwar status quo.

His company went bankrupt in 2007, the year after he retired. There had been “irregularities” in the management of his pension fund, so that about half of it disappeared with his erstwhile employer. He still had his Social Security check, of course; but he and Mom would have been in dire straits had I not been in a position to help them. And then there were all the bills associated with Laurie’s condition.

I thought again about the firing of Kevin Lang, about Kurt Myers and the other members of the TP Automotive management team. I knew that I would never be able to fully reconcile my role as an agent of such people with my love for my parents and sister.

I was about to delve more deeply into these moral fine points when my cell phone chimed with a text message. Claire Turner was waiting for me.

It was ten minutes past eight o’clock in the evening. The drapes were drawn across the bedroom of the suite I had rented at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Dayton. I was exhausted from a series of exertions that had been quite pleasant. Pleasant and dangerous, considering my activity partner

“Craig Walker,” she said. “Now I know why I work for you instead of McKinsey or Boston Consulting.”

I rolled over and looked at the woman in bed beside me, rolling her words around in my head before responding. As was always the case with this woman, I would have to tread carefully.

Claire stroked my naked flank. “What I mean is: I’d be willing to bet that a job with McKinsey or Boston wouldn’t come with similar fringe benefits.”

“Hmm,” I replied. Sometimes it was best to simply avoid any concrete response. The remark about McKinsey and Boston was the sort of backhanded compliment that Claire Turner frequently uttered after sex. This particular barb stung me on multiple levels. First of all, it highlighted the fact that I was breaking the rules—going to bed with a person who was in my employment. Craig Walker Consulting might be a two-person firm; but rules were rules—and I was breaking them.

I also knew that Claire would rather have a job with McKinsey & Company or the Boston Consulting Group. And she knew that I knew it. She had only accepted a job with me because last year had been a bad hiring year for freshly minted MBAs. I knew (and once again—
she knew that I knew
) that her gig with me was nothing more than a way station—a steppingstone to bigger and better things. This time next year—if she had her way—Claire would occupy a plush tenth-story office at one of the
real
consulting firms. The ones that don’t skulk in the shadows.

Finally, we both knew that the “fringe benefits” were mine and not hers: I had always had an easy time with women—at least compared to other men. But the dynamics of the jungle still applied: Men are in supply and women are in demand. All things being equal, an attractive woman still trumps an attractive man.

And most men would have gladly traded one of their limbs to go to bed with a woman like Claire. It wasn't simply the fact that she was blonde and 5'11". There was the sheer feat of taming her. There was an intensity about Claire that the average man would have found more than a little intimidating.